Tag Archives: Poetry

A Night of Levels and Quadrants with the 'Lectric Collective

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The ‘Lectric Collective reading, held on Dec. 9th at the Krowswork Gallery in Oakland was a mind and art expanding experience. Thanks to Sarah, Kelsa and Jill and Jasmine for putting together a great evening of art and poetry.
The theme of the night–accidental recordings and the framing of experience through the art of juxtaposition–made me think about the many tricks I play on myself, all the constraints I put on the writing of the poem in order to court the muse of chance. How do all these little accidents, mistakes, missteps, subconscious encounters, and forays into the unknown end up creating a poem–or a person, or a movement, for that matter?
I went back to the work of the philosopher Ken Wilber and found this diagram (projected onscreen during the reading) that depicts his theory of “All Quadrants, All Levels.” In it, he posits a description of the architecture of the cosmos that includes the interior experience of the individual (perceptions), the objective behavior of said individual (what can be seen and observed), the interior experience of the collective (culture), and the structures that the collective create in order to reflect the culture (society).

Using this rubric, any poem I write is mappable–and in fact, the poem itself can be seen as a map indicating where I am in my life at the very moment that I write it. The poem comes into being in the same way that my self emerges into a moment.
The idea of writing through the various layers of individual and collective experience reminded me of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge‘s poetic statement from the anthology, Lyric Postmodernisms (edited by by the late Reginald Shepherd):

“That particular conjunction of events which includes the history of your body, your experience, and your art vertically, and the time and circumstances you are in horizontally, seeks an expression that is inevitably unique, or new.”

“I have an intuition of a new form, as a new expertise in the topology of expression, emotion, and culture.”

To allow a poem to inhabit a space that is personal, historical, cultural and social seems like another way of explicating imagistically Wilber’s sense of levels and quadrants. For instance, in these lines from her poem, “Tan Tien,” Bersenbrugge approaches the notion of the body as a physical entity, but also one that exists in relation to other people as a link between the natural and manmade structures of the world:

If being by yourself separates from your symmetry, which is
the axis of your spine in the concrete sense, but becomes a suspension
in your spine like a layer of sand under the paving stones of a courtyard
or on a plain, you have to humbly seek out a person who can listen to you,
on a street crowded with bicycles at night, their bells ringing.

 

"Love Is a Weather of Body" in Spiral Orb Four

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My poem, “Love Is a Weather of Body,” is up on Spiral Orb Four, a journal of “permaculture” poetics! The editor, Eric Magrane, does a bang up job of choosing lines or fragments from each of the poems in the issue to create what he calls a “composted” opening poem that also serves as the table of contents. Very cool. He also hyperlinks the poems from within the issue which makes the reading experience a kind of diy adventure–you choose where to go next by clicking on the highlighted phrases in each poem.
It made me think of something I read recently in Jonathan Stalling’s essay on Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry”:

“By using snapshots of dependently originating bundles, a poet, for Fenollosa, can actually mimic nature’s own infinitely interpenetrating flux while at the same time establishing conventional truths in beautiful harmonies within the patterns of language and nature itself.”

What the poet does on the level of the poem is what Magrane is doing on the level of the journal. It definitely feels connected to my poem and I’m really happy to be part of the permaculture!

On The Airwaves

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My poem, Undercurrent, was broadcast on the July 30, 2011 episode of Poet As Radio.
Click on the link above to listen to it.  Click on Poet As Radio link to listen to the show, where you can hear a wide-ranging conversation with Chris Stroffolino and Delia’s cool, multi-track poem, “She Do the Police In Different Voices”.
Thanks to Jay, Delia and Nicholas for their great work.

Cubist Pronouns Unite

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When I was writing my review for Juliana Spahr’s book of poems, Well Then There Now, I thought I would describe her use of pronouns, which seemed very cubist to me. Then I ended up writing about the biography of the poems melding with the autobiography of the poet. I guess reviews are like poems–they never turn out the way you think they will!
I like the way Spahr narrates many of her poems in the collective “we,” using a choral technique to embody the universal nature of experience. Here’s an excerpt from “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”:
We come into the world.
We come into the world and there it is.
The sun is there.
The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown
of the ocean is there.
Salmon and eels are there moving between the brown
and the brown and the blue.
The green of the land is there.
Elders and youngers are there.
We come into the world and we are there.
And we begin to breathe.
We come into the world and there it is.
We come into the world without and we breathe it in.
We come into the world and begin to move between the
brown and the blue and the green of it.
But I think her boldest move, pronoun-wise, is seen in this snippet of the poem, “Unnamed Dragonfly Species,” which is narrated by an unnamed “they”:
They heard about all this cracking and breaking away on the news
and then they began to search over the internet for information
on what was going on. Blue Whale On the internet they found an
animation of the piece of the Antarctic Pine Island glacier breaking
off. Bluebreast Darter After they found this, they often called this
animation up and just watched it over and over on their screen in
their dimly lit room. Blue-spotted Salamander. . .
The descriptions and thoughts in the poem can be assumed to be the speaker’s own, but she chooses to write from the viewpoint of the other, which leads the reader to imagine that the speaker is part of a subgroup of people doing the same thing in different parts of the world, having the same thoughts and worries and hopes. By acknowledging that she is a part of this subgroup, the poet also places herself in opposition to those who aren’t doing what she is. She becomes part of the “they” of the poem. Wow, being a cubist poet is kind of a yoga-like activity, isn’t it?
I really admire Juliana Spahr’s use of pronouns–by writing poems from different vantage points, she expresses the presence of an “I” in “we,” “they,” and even “you.” To be  able to occupy so many perspectives at once seems like a very cubist position!
 

Gertrude Stein and Tantra

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I’m excited to post my first broadcast book review of Jennifer Moxley’s poems, “The Line”!  Thanks to Jay, Nick and Delia for including me on their cool show, “Poet As Radio.”  A great interview with the poet Sara Larsen, author of  “A A A A A” and “The Hallucinated” kicks things off–my review starts at the 51:30 mark.  I’m currently working on a review of Juliana Spahr’s “well then there now” for a future show.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the similarities between poetry and tantra, the school of practices that views the body itself as a vehicle for liberation.  It’s a huge subject, but for me the idea is that just as tantra sees the body as the way to become liberated from itself, poetry uses language to become liberated from the constrictions of language.  Tantra uses a vast array of methods, from pranayama (breathing) to mantra (chanting), mandalas and yantras (geometric depictions of the universe), and others to enable the body to experience itself as fluid energy rather than a single identity.  It’s true that you can look at the mandala below and just see a pretty design made of bright colors, but if you are a student of tantra, you can learn how to let the image change the way you look at the world around you.

Similarly, Gertrude Stein used language in a way that subverted the rational mind’s ability to make meaning in its usual way.  Here’s her poem, “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass”:

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

I like the way Stein’s poem plays with my mind.  All those “s” sounds in “glass,” “cousin,” “spectacle,” “strange,” “single,” and “system”!  Then the double and triple and quadruple negatives of “not ordinary,” “not unordered,” and “not resembling.”  And the final difference, now “spreading.”

Ok, my mind’s primed now–time to go out and “unorder” it some more.  I’m going to see the Gertrude Stein exhibit, “The Steins Collect,” at SFMOMA!

 

Fantastic Ekphrasis!

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Wow, I see it has been a while since I posted!  Well, I can say I haven’t been idle since I was writing my thesis, As a Wave Is a Force, which was a big endeavor, and for which I received my MFA from the University of San Francisco!  I was thrilled with my letters of acceptance from Brian Teare, my fantastic thesis advisor, and Aaron Shurin, the program director/Big Kahuna at USF.  I will definitely treasure their reflections on my work forever.  There are all kinds of ways to become a poet, but the USF program was totally the right way to go for me.  A huge thanks to all my teachers, fellow writers, friends and family who were part of this incredible journey!  I learned things far beyond anything I had imagined–and I had the best time doing it!
Now I’m in post-MFA mode and happy to have a couple of things out in the world.  A set of four poems titled “Life in Necropolis,” in Issue 12 of Switchback and a book review in the March 2011 issue of Folly Magazine.  Click on the links in the sidebar to check them out.
Switchback is the online journal at USF and Folly Magazine is a beautiful online journal of art, aesthetics and poetry.  Enjoy the gorgeous paintings in Folly by Michael Raedecker, a Dutch painter who works in acrylic and thread.
Which brings me to a subject near and dear to my poetry:  Ekphrasis, poems based on other mediums and artforms.  One of the most famous examples of an ekphrastic poem is Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”:

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Like many readers, I love the way this poem moves, how it turns the light of perception back on us at the end, when it had been placed so intently on the statue of Apollo.  And yet, as much as I love the description of the artwork itself, I often find myself writing ekphrastic poetry that does not necessarily include description as part of its content.  My poem, “Life in Necropolis,” for instance, was inspired by a modern version of a Chinese terracotta warrior by the artist, Wanxin Zhang, but you don’t really see the statue itself in the poem.  The first section of the poem is about the farmers who found the actual terracotta warriors in their field in Xi’an as they were digging for water.  Thinking about how the farmers were displaced from their home after the discovery led me to remember the people (including my grandparents) who immigrated to America, which led me to ponder the assimilation of my generation and then the dissemination of information and culture via that assimilation.  The journey of the immigrant became the journey of the poems embodied in the writing of the poems.
I also included ekphrastic poems in As a Wave Is a Force, inspired by the work of two artists, Nick Cave and William Kentridge, who had exhibitions in San Francisco during the summer of 2009.  I thought of these as “translations,” rather than descriptions, but that brings up a whole different can of ekphrastic worms, so I’ll write about that in another post. . . someday.
Anyway, I am super curious about what other people think about using visual art as material for poetry!  What is your take on it, and do you have any ekphrastic poems you love?